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JA: At what point were you allowed to leave the camp?

BS: Well, you know, the war, the tide had turned and so I don't remember the timeframe. But I know they encouraged people to go work on the farms, do a work furlough to go work on the farms in Idaho and Utah, and then, and they were by then in late '42, they were encouraging people to leave the camp to relocate into the Midwest or cities east of the Rockies. And my brother, who by then had gone to a camp in Jerome, left the camp and went to Chicago to work, hoping to get into a dental school to continue his education, but because they had these military programs, it was hard for an Asian to get into dental school, plus you weren't allowed to be in those programs. So he waited until after the war and he finally finished his schooling at Minnesota.

JA: And you went on to college after camp?

BS: I went to college in the summer of 1945, I got accepted to UCLA, so I went to -- started summer school during the summer term at UCLA. And by then the war ended, and my draft changed from 4-F to 1-A and I got drafted one week after V-J Day, and I served in Fort MacArthur for six months typing discharges. I left, I left Manzanar in 1943 -- no 1944, to go help my dad as a translator in case I was needed, because my dad had developed cancer of the throat and they couldn't treat him in the Manzanar hospital, and they knew, they suggested that he go to Salt Lake City where he could get x-ray treatments. So my father went to Salt Lake City and I accompanied him in 1944. I had finished school so I had free time, and from there I returned to Manzanar and my parents encouraged us to get a college education, so they suggested I go join my brother in Chicago, maybe hoping to get into a school someplace. And that's when I got my 1-A and I took a physical in Chicago, and I passed the physical in Chicago and I decided I'd return to Manzanar and see my mother and father before I went to, into the service.

On the way from Manzanar to Salt Lake City, I broke my glasses. And these glasses were the type where there was just a little screw holding the lens, and I broke my lens in a funny accident. And then when I got to Salt Lake City, having lived there before, I just put my glasses in my suitcase, and I put my suitcase in one of those five- or ten-cent lockers at the bus terminal. And I decided, "I don't want to carry my suitcase on the bus to go to Fort Douglas." So I go to Fort Douglas, and I don't have my glasses. So when they took my physical and checked my eyes, I couldn't read the board, the chart, so they made me 4-F. [Laughs] And the embarrassing thing was, my friend threw a party for me in Manzanar, thinking that I was getting drafted, and here I am 4-F. I couldn't return to camp right away, so I stayed in, in Salt Lake City working as a dishwasher, busboy. Until one day, my friend told me, "Let's go to the pool hall." I'd never been in a pool hall before, never even held a cue stick or whatever. He says, "Let's go to the pool hall," so I accompanied him. Lo and behold, it was my dad's day off, working in Salt Lake City, and he had gone to the pool hall to read the newspaper. And there were two doors to this pool hall, and I finally realized, oh, my gosh, that's my dad over there, over there. So I snuck out the other door, and out comes rushing my dad, saying, "What are you doing in the pool hall?" I said, "I've never been in one before, but my friend talked me into going." And so my father wrote to my mother saying, "We'd better send him back to camp and make him, get him into some university." So I had to go back to camp. [Laughs] That was an embarrassing situation.

[Interruption]

JA: Did any of your brothers or sisters work in the medical field at camp?

BS: Yeah, my brother was a dentist and he had taken over a practice of a dentist in Gardena who had developed TB, and so my brother took over his practice for about six months. Then evacuation came, and he decided at the time -- the Fresno area was still an open area -- and he decided he'd go to the Fresno area to open an office. So he opened an office there for a couple of months and then the Fresno area got closed and he went to a camp called Gila, Gila River. And he was single and my mother wanted him married, so she had him transferred to Manzanar. So he was a dentist in Manzanar for a year. And my sister was a medical student, she was just a freshman at Cal Berkley. So she did work at the hospital -- I don't know what she did, but she did work at the hospital. And then she finally got into medical school, the Women's Medical in Philadelphia, so she left camp to go there.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.